Unless a set of ancestors died on the same day, there was a time when one of them was a widow or a widower. The decision to remain single is a personal one but was often impacted on finances, whether small children were present in the home when the spouse died, availability of family and friends to provide assistance, personal need for companionship, desire to have more children, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These reasons are personal and some are subjective. One ancestor who becomes a widow at twenty-six with small children may feel the need to marry again relatively soon. Another in seemingly the same situation may never marry again. Others may wait years or decades to marry again. The key is to not assume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What you should do is research the widow or widower as much as possible to gain what insight one can decades after the fact. While records of a relative needing companionship are hard to obtain, financial records from the settlement of the deceased spouse’s estate (if there are records) may give insight into their economic situation. Knowledge of their surrounding family structure–their children, siblings, parents, and in-laws, may provide some clues as well. Look at ages when children married as that’s probably when they left the family home. Census records may indicate if the individual had a hired man, took in boarders, or altered their household structure in other ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Don’t assume that a person widowed in their thirties never married if it didn’t happen when the children were small. They may have waited for a variety of reasons. The desire for companionship in their later years, combined with the knowledge of no more pregnancies, may have been the motivation for some. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And…if you ancestor became single because of divorce, that throws an additional variable into the mix. Divorced people married again–or did not–for a variety of reasons as well. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unless a set of ancestors died on the same day, there was a time when one of them was a widow or a widower. The decision to remain single is a personal one but was often impacted on finances, whether small children were present in the home when the spouse died, availability of family and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153979"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33789\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}